David Hockney is relaxing after lunch. The house feels full as his friend John, who made the meal, and assistant Jean-Pierre, an accordionist — true: I've seen the accordion — move around.
“I remember seeing a Sargent in the Chicago Art Institute,” he says, “and thinking, fucking good, you know, great, and even the bravura slickness, I admire it. And then I went round the corner and there's a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it's not the level of Van Gogh.”
The house is a brilliant succession of different colored rooms, a kind of benign House of Usher. Like his London home, it transports you into a generous roving space. I have to admit this was not how I imagined it when I was on a dank train from Doncaster to Bridlington in Yorkshire in the north of England, looking over at a woman reading a book called The World's Greatest Serial Killers. It was a dismal late-summer day as I headed north towards the Yorkshire seaside town where Hockney has been spending much of his time painting the local landscape. I knew that his sister Margaret lives there, that his mother spent her last years there, and somehow I had pictured the famous Los Angeles-based British artist lodging in a spare bedroom in a relative's house.
There is a photograph taken of him in the 1960s with Andy Warhol, in which it is not the evasive Warhol but the bold, blond David, naturally smoking a cigarette, who looks cool. There are many other images of Hockney from the 1960s and 1970s that have that deadpan glamour. He seems sometimes nowadays to have changed unrecognizably. It is not just that he has gray hair and looks like the 69-year-old Yorkshireman he is. It is the polemics and debating fury that make him so different from the dreamy painter of men in swimming pools. He buttonholes politicians in defense of the right to smoke. He advances arguments about the death of photography. He writes art history that sells by the bucketload and enrages academics. It is all a long way from the Hockney of Jack Hazan's 1974 film A Bigger Splash, which portrays him as an enigmatic flaneur on the boundaries of art and fashion.
With a retrospective of his portraits opening at the National Portrait Gallery in London next month, as well as a show of his Yorkshire landscapes and a new edition of his book Secret Knowledge, it is time to look beyond our current image of a bluff and British David Hockney. A couple of years ago, I went with him to see the Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery in London. He had a theory to expound, a new chapter for his book Secret Knowledge, and in front of each picture he showed me why he thinks Caravaggio must have used a camera lucida (an artist's optical aid), constructing his scenes like a film director in the editing suite.
Afterwards, we went to his London home and John made dinner. David Graves, who helped Hockney research Secret Knowledge, came too. More fascinating for me, Gregory Evans, who appears in A Bigger Splash, was there, scrolling through recent Hockney watercolors on a Powerbook screen. The show at the National Portrait Gallery includes Hockney's portraits of this old friend and assistant, including the 1975 drawing Gregory Leaning Nude. As Hockney rolled out a reproduction of a Chinese scroll with an endless landscape that, he pointed out, wonderfully depicts the world without any need for the western invention of perspective, I was really starting to enjoy myself.
Hockney is not the ageing British eccentric he might appear to be from the outside. He is surrounded by the same characters, and new versions of the characters, who appear in A Bigger Splash, the strangely beautiful and moving 1970s documentary in which Hockney and his friends moon and brood in archetypal 1970s interiors, at fashion shows and beside swimming pools. What made me happy that night was seeing the connection between Hockney now and Hockney then. I love those paintings of his from the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which longing and emptiness and solitude all hang in the air, as a body vanishes into water or Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy pose in a Gainsborough masquerade.
The Artistic ‘agorophiliac’
Having had an insight into Hockney that night, I suppose I should not have been expecting anything different when I visited him in Bridlington. There is an undoubted surrealism to his spending so much time nowadays in a quiet corner of provincial England, but when you enter his house, you immediately realize how in control of this irony he is, and how foolish it would be to see a narrative of ageing and retirement in his current life. It is nothing like that simple. The house is an outpost of LA, except that instead of the Pacific it looks out on a bowling green and the gray North Sea.
What, I ask, drew him as a young man to LA, so much the opposite of the Yorkshire pastoral he is currently besotted with? It was the “sexiness” of the place, of course, but also its space. Hockney describes himself as an “agorophiliac” — he loves wide open spaces. Putting it another way, he says he's mildly claustrophobic. For this reason he could never bear to live in New York. It's the spread of southern California that delights him. When Hockney talks about LA he makes you see it through his eyes, as a place full of sensitive souls.
I ask him about the California painting I love best, his 1966 picture Beverly Hills Housewife. A tall woman stands in front of a modernist house that is a succession of flat planes, theatrical scenery almost, and disjunctive objects: a stuffed animal head; a zebra-hide lounger; a palm tree; a sculpture; empty blue sky beyond; evenly mowed grass in front. I'm crushed to hear that this painting, which still belongs to its subject, Betty Freeman, cannot come to the National Portrait Gallery because “She's 84 now and so she'd only lend it to LA because she wouldn't see it for a year — would she ever see it again?” Freeman is a photographer, says the catalogue, and a patron of new music. Hockney puts it less piously. “She had these musical salons — LaMonte Young [the Fluxus and minimalist composer], one note for three hours. That's what drove her first husband away. Then she married an Italian, Franco, who didn't mind the concerts. He was an Italian aristocrat, actually. He would make pasta in the kitchen, and he'd say to me, ‘I love Puccini, David.”’
Hockney's life is nothing if not surprising. When he gets bored of Bridlington (although he, John and Jean-Pierre insist this is practically impossible), they get a boat from Hull and head off for Germany, where Hockney enjoys the baths at Baden-Baden. On a recent visit they went to the local art museum and he was explaining works by artists he respects such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. Anyway, these were interesting paintings, and he was finding things to praise. And then they came to a row of six late Picassos. Hockney stood speechless, then said to John, “This is art made with the hand, the eye and the heart.” John looked for a while and he said, “And the pussy!”
Picasso has been Hockney's artistic hero since the 1960s. “I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.” Hockney never thought of himself as a portraitist as such — although, obviously, he has painted a lot of portraits — until this new exhibition. It captures something fundamental about his best work, its diaristic directness. Love and friendship — and loss — are what you see in these pictures. A lot of the people are no longer here, he acknowledges.
To make good portraits, he says, “You do need to be interested in people.” In his book Secret Knowledge he argues that Ingres, even Holbein, must have used some form of primitive camera to record faces with mesmerizing realism — but he believes the greatest art, meaning Picasso and Rembrandt, has a humanity beyond appearances. Picasso's portraits “tell you about the people. He's looked at them, and they have something different from anybody else.” The cubist style does not preclude intimacy — it increases it — and Picasso is able to show you who people really are. Similarly, the interiority of Van Gogh is on another level from the exteriority of Sargent. “There are painters who are very good who are not necessarily portraitists; Richard Diebenkorn painted the figure in a very interesting way, but not particularly portraits. He didn't care too much about the psychology of it.”
Hockney does care about the psychology of it, and this sets him apart from the hack portrait artists whose works fill the modern section of the National Portrait Gallery. (He has only painted one commissioned portrait.) His pictures are of his familiars. A world takes shape when you look at them, a world that exists in the networks of affiliation that have surrounded Hockney and still do. There are two portraits in the retrospective of John and Jean-Pierre in Bridlington.
Of course, Hockney is here to paint, and upstairs he shows me the latest in a series of generously sized pictures in which he is following the seasonal changes at favorite locations in the farmland of east Yorkshire. He drives me back to York through this glacially formed, wide and gently cut landscape, explaining the geology to me and showing me the places he has painted — fields and woodlands, a “tunnel” of overhanging trees up a lane. Many people will see these as supremely backward-looking paintings, and so it is worth stressing how far Hockney is from being a conservative anti-modernist.
He enthusiastically describes visiting the Eva Hesse exhibition at Tate Modern in London a while ago. “I loved the show; I did some sketches of things falling down to the floor, the fragility of them, and they were wonderfully graphic, actually. And I thought the rooms were really quite beautiful. I remember seeing them in the late 1960s and you thought, ‘very unusual, things falling off the wall.’ But I loved the show, and yet you do realize — everything becomes decorative after a while.” Warming to his theme, he leaps from Hesse to ancient Aztec sculpture. “Remember that big pot that's in Mexico City, that big serpent pot? I think they had it at the RA [Royal Academy of Arts] in the Aztecs show. Well, when Cortez [the Spanish conquistador of Mexico in the 16th century] saw that pot, it was the ugliest thing in the world, because it was meant to hold hot human hearts still pumping. It took them 300 years before they began to see the beauty in the pot. The use was so horrible, it would overpower form.”
A breed apart
Blood and guts and pots, bits of string and painted trees. Talking about art with David Hockney is fundamentally different from interviewing any other artist. Where most artists seem interested in other art only as a mirror of their preoccupations, Hockney is a voracious student with acute insights. What will his own place in art history be? He and Lucian Freud are the two eminent living British painters — but where Freud has enjoyed a reverence as an Old Master in his lifetime, it will be Hockney's works of the 1960s and 1970s that are still looked at decades hence, when Freud has become a neglected minor master in the corners of museums.
I do not think it is flattery to say that, in unexpected ways, David Hockney still is a model for young artists. As I was writing this piece I was getting e-mails in response to an article on why so little art has been made about the war in Iraq. Graffitists and online agitprop collagists sent me their images. Among them was a message from Hockney's studio: he wanted me to see his recent painting The Massacre and the Problems of Depiction, which juxtaposes his interpretation of Picasso's Massacre in Korea with an image of a war photographer, and implicitly asks: can painting still deal with war, can photography? It was done in 2003, as America and Britain attacked Iraq. This brilliant and experimental artist is still passionately engaged with the way the world works.
The new edition of Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Old Masters by David Hockney is published by Thames & Hudson on Sept. 23.
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
As we live longer, our risk of cognitive impairment is increasing. How can we delay the onset of symptoms? Do we have to give up every indulgence or can small changes make a difference? We asked neurologists for tips on how to keep our brains healthy for life. TAKE CARE OF YOUR HEALTH “All of the sensible things that apply to bodily health apply to brain health,” says Suzanne O’Sullivan, a consultant in neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, and the author of The Age of Diagnosis. “When you’re 20, you can get away with absolute
When the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese forces 50 years ago this week, it prompted a mass exodus of some 2 million people — hundreds of thousands fleeing perilously on small boats across open water to escape the communist regime. Many ultimately settled in Southern California’s Orange County in an area now known as “Little Saigon,” not far from Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, where the first refugees were airlifted upon reaching the US. The diaspora now also has significant populations in Virginia, Texas and Washington state, as well as in countries including France and Australia.
May 5 to May 11 What started out as friction between Taiwanese students at Taichung First High School and a Japanese head cook escalated dramatically over the first two weeks of May 1927. It began on April 30 when the cook’s wife knew that lotus starch used in that night’s dinner had rat feces in it, but failed to inform staff until the meal was already prepared. The students believed that her silence was intentional, and filed a complaint. The school’s Japanese administrators sided with the cook’s family, dismissing the students as troublemakers and clamping down on their freedoms — with
RSS